Power Projection

Nov 19, 2003

As a component of our recent Full Thrust obsession, Inire bought a
copy of Power Projection from
Warehouse 23. It’s a ship-combat game set
in the Traveller universe, and based on
the Full Thrust rules.

The thing I really like about Power Projection is its refinement of
the vector movement system introduced in Fleet Book 1. Instead of
tracking the velocity of each ship with, say, a little arrow counter
(for direction) and a die (for magnitude), it uses a “future position”
counter to track the endpoint of the velocity vector. Underneath the
ship mini at the beginning of each turn is a “current position” counter.
After movement orders are written, and it’s time to move the ships, each
mini is placed on the future position counter, and then moved according
to its orders for the turn. Then a line is drawn from current position
to mini, extended past it a like distance, and the future position
counter placed there.

This means first and foremost that there’s no bookkeeping to track
current speed. And the error introduced by nudging the future position
counter is much less than nudging a direction counter next to the ship
would be. It also means that – as seems fitting in a setting where
computer-aided targetting would likely be the rule – the other players
have a better idea of where each ship is going to be next turn. This is
information they’d theoretically have already, but makes it more clear
to all concerned what’s going on.

The other changes I’m not so hot about. Weapons and shields come in more
flavors than they do in basic Full Thrust, but have much less
variation in terms of rules. All of the beam weapons come in regular and
enhanced varieties (mining lasers being an exception), and differ mainly
in terms of range. There are also several kinds of missle (including
bomb-pumped lasers warheads), and “sandcasters,” which are sort of like
smokescreens of reflective particles.

All non-missile weapons use the same to-hit/damage chart. Range,
shielding, and other modifiers shift the row of the chart used, and the
necessary roll on a d6 to do damage; it’s similar to the way screens in
Full Thrust work, but generalized. Shields are really just modifiers.
Different flavors of shield affect certain weapons more than others, but
most ships seem to mount some of each. Frankly, I’m not all that wild
about all of the modifiers, and the need for the chart. I’m sure it gets
faster with more play, but it just feels off, somehow.

There are definitely elements of Power Projection that I’m thinking of
adapting back into Full Thrust – the movement refinements,
sandcasters, and perhaps bomb-pumped laser missles – but on the whole,
I think I prefer the simplicity of the original.